So, Yurikuma is done. I'm surprised it was so short (12 episodes), as I was expecting at least a full season, but then again, the story arc was so lean and tightly plotted it really couldn't have supported many more episodes without some major expansion or twisting.

It's not the masterpiece that Utena was, but it was quite enjoyable, both from an entertainment perspective and a "chance to experience another Ikuhara world" perspective. (Made me want to seek out Penguindrum, a show I have heretofore not felt much interest in seeing.)

My opinion of the show elevated greatly after reading the excellent episode analysis articles at ANN:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/revi…/yurikuma-arashi/.83208

There's a *lot* more packed into the meta of this show than I ever expected or would have known without reading her posts. She also links to another reviewer whose posts I am reading now:

http://joseinextdoor.tumblr.com/tagg…/yurikuma+arashi/page/2

They are longer and more "episode recap-ey" but also include some different ideas about the meanings of things in the show that I had not considered.

Love to discuss it more here, but that's hard to do without spoilers, in case anyone does intend to watch. I will say I was mildly disappointed with how it ended. It's not bad, but... I kind of expected more. Still, a great show and worth a blu-ray purchase when it comes out.

I've been on a tear through yuri anime and manga series this year. I haven't been updating here really because there seemed to be little to no interest. But recently I have been reading a series that might get some attention. Way back in the day there was a decent amount of talk about the Maka-Maka series around here. It was an extremely well-done slice of life comic about two girls with boyfriends who had a lot of sex with each other on the side. It didn't really have a happy ending (in the sense that the girls paired up or anything) but the beautiful full-color prints and tastefully sexy drawings won a lot of fans.

Recently I've been reading on Dynasty Scans (and bless chimekolover forever, wherever he is, for introducing me to that site - if you like lesbian manga and you're not using and supporting Dynasty Scans, you're doing it wrong) a series called "Otome no Teikoku." The translator calls it "Virgins' Empire," but "otome" doesn't mean "virgin," it's just another word for a young girl. It's a long-running slice-of-life series about the intertwining lives of a gaggle of high school girls who attend an all-girls school. I know, I know, where have we heard that before? But this one's a bit different.

The characters are incredibly three-dimensional, distinct, and well-rounded. The relationships vary widely in intesity, dynamics, seriousness, and gayness - some are just friends messing around, some are just girls being naughty, others are very clearly love pairings. They behave in a way that you can more or less believe real girls would (despite the fact that, of course, none of this would really happen!) The art is gorgeous, it has a level of detail you don't always find even in manga, and the characters have a nice variety of realistic (but all super cute) body types.

As it turns out (and maybe you guessed) the manga-ka (author/artist) is the same one that penned Maka-Maka, Kishi Torajirou! I didn't realize it until I started looking up what else he'd done because I was so impressed with the series. Makes total sense though. He has an incredible eye for detail, ones that add both realism and sexiness. Be aware that there's no actual sex in this series, it's a tease series, R-rated at most. But it's super easy to get invested in the stories of the different couples, they are funny and sexy and entertaining. Kishi-sensei is the master of visualizing the infinite variety of casual ways that women are sexy, and depicting sexy scenes that toe right up to the line of fetishism but still seem somewhat plausible.

Anyway, if you were a fan of Maka-Maka I highly recommend you give "Virgins Empire" and Kishi-sensei's other work that's on DS, "Kissing Mars" (more properly translated "The Kiss of Mars") a shot.

I'm interested in the topic, it's just a case of where to start. But A good one I discovered last year is "Valkyrie Drive Mermaid." An Absurd premise which involves women needing to arouse their partners so they transform into weapons for battles. Despite the Yuri, the series is actually watchable.

Hah, yeah, Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid is utterly trashy nonsense. In a lot of ways I think it's a tough sell - it's definitely too raunchy to attract any kind of a mainstream audience, even if it actually contained a plot that wasn't paper thin connective tissue to hold together scenes of nudity and sex play. The characters have absolutely no depth or dimension and are largely flat, irritating sex stereotypes.

On the other hand, it doesn't go nearly far enough to work as porn. There isn't a single scene where the girls have sex for pleasure, it's all ridiculously contrived setup for quite public battle scenes. And the smut is limited to nudity, kissing, and a little breast play. It basically sets up the scenes in such a way where you wish they would either push it further so one could get off on it, or dial it back and improve the story so it works as a narrative. As it is, I feel like it pleases neither audience.

Anyone who isn't a fan of impossibly proportioned women won't find much here either, as nearly every character has the body of a giant-breasted stripper. The camera is leering and no opportunity is missed for service shots and jiggle physics even during the dramatic or violent moments. And finally, a significant amount of the "sex" parts play directly into standard uncomfortable hentai tropes like rape, tentacles, hardcore BDSM, and other forms of abuse and humiliation leading to arousal.

As Johnny B. said, though, due to the paucity of anime that features no punches pulled canonical yuri pairings and storylines, fans take what they can get. As an expert at mind-filtering stuff in hentai that I don't like to appreciate the parts that I do, and one who will endure a lot for a scrap of yuri, I was able to navigate the series and even enjoy it at times (Lady Lady were pretty cool). >As for where to start, this thread has a lot of good recommendations. I'd be happy to continue to post as I watch/read things if that's helpful. If there's something you know you like I can try to offer specific recommendations. There are some good blogs to watch for breaking news and currently airing - yurinoboke seems to be on hiatus but Okazu is also good (look elsewhere for smuttier stuff like VDM, though, she doesn't post about those).

For manga, just poking around on Dynasty Scans delivers a wealth of awesome stuff. They only have translated stuff though, and even then not everything when it comes to hentai. So if you're jonesing enough to look around on other H-manga sites, be aware that most use the "yuri" tag to mean "contains at least one panel where two girls are in the same sex scene" so be prepared to stomach a lot of stuff you maybe will wish you hadn't seen in order to exhume some stuff you like. It's a skill that takes time to master. :p

Dynasty scans is a good place to starts. There is also lililicious, another scanlation group with a big cataloge of stuff. Check out the Yuri hime and for some short one shots and Yuri hime wildrose for more explicit content. And anything by Chi-Ran is great.

One series I like is called 15-sai, age 15 I believe. It's about a girl who finds herself living with her cousin and questioning her sexuality. There a few twists, and it does get a bit explicit. Overall a nice grounded manga. Only problem is it is slow to update. Baka updates says there a a few volumes released in Japan but only 4 chapters are translated so far.

Johnny - Cool! I still feel the same way about Citrus as before. I like Yuzu a lot, but the rest of the story is pretty ridiculous. But more translated and commercially released yuri is good.

Stressa - Thanks for the heads up on 15-sai. Fly By Yuri is the translator, they are pretty great, they do a nice job with Morinaga Milk's work. Looks like now that they have their work on The Last Uniform out of the way (I'm not a fan) they will be focusing on Hana and Hina (a Morinaga joint) and 15-sai. I'll have to look up Chi-Ran as well.

Cut-and-paste old reviews of yuri-containing anime series I wrote over the past year:

Blue Drop

How did I miss this one for so long?! It wears the trappings of so many other modern yuri shows, but it's a little older (early 2000s) so maybe that's why it manages to exceed the form so well, back before creators decided that these slice-of-life shows didn't need to be *about* anything. Anyway, again, the bones are familiar - new girl starting at an exclusive all-girls boarding school, slice-of-life storytelling focused on stuff like exams and the school festival - but the details are so rich and just slightly different that the story really feels lived-in. All the characters are given room to develop and breathe and seem fresh and realistic, and the animation and sound are gorgeous, and really help to set a mood that I can't describe ... calm and sad, maybe?

But that's only half the story. Simmering in the background constantly is a plot about an alien invasion, an old disaster, and how all these characters tie into it. But what I consider no less than amazing is that the ship battles and assorted action *always* take a back seat to what's happening at the school. It's obvious in retrospect (kind of but not really a spoiler), but the show has a very resigned quality - the battle is already lost, so it's just a matter of how these characters are living for today. Also pretty amazing is how minimal the fanservice is. The alien uniforms are silly, but not overly sexualized, and the moments when Mari feels her attraction to Hagino flare up are clearly shot in from Mari's PoV and not for titillation.

Perhaps even more amazing is how this came out of the the source material. The show has a sad ending, and I wanted to find out if the manga continued in any hopeful way. Turns out the manga is night-and-day different from the show. Like, not even the same characters or even time (it's set thousands of years after the show). I feel like the creators of the show were inspired in the best possible way to make a beautiful character study out of the ideas in the source, and also clearly enchanted with the emotions of being on, in, or near water. It's not without flaws or occasional nonsense but I really liked it.

What a weird little show. On the surface, it's kind of a series tailor-made to sell toys and cards to kids - a girl enters an unusual high school where everyone develops super powers related to their club activity and battle in video game-like contests for school ranking. The gem battles, the colorful characters and unique powers all spell kiddie fare... but...

First off, the heroine, Eruna, is an unabashed pervert, who lusts after all the girls on campus. Not like "Oh, she's so impressive" Class-S stuff, but like, horny nosebleed let-me-kiss-you stuff. (Having to start her own club, she starts the "Surround Ichinomiya Eruna With Cute Girls Club").

Second, the show isn't particularly interested in those battles. Eruna is strong but not the strongest and is beaten a few times. A lot of the battles take place off camera - she will just show up and say "oh, I won my last two matches!" or, "Oh, I lost!" and then it will move on to other stuff. The battles that get shown tend to happen fast.

Eruna is an unusual/interesting heroine aside from her girl-lusting. She is a rare anime heroine who has absolutely no lack of self-confidence. She always thinks she can handle whatever happens, and when she loses or someone is nasty to her she fights back with jokes and smiles and energy. She doesn't mope or cry once.

The show also has a weird and manic sense of humor, based largely around how bullishly oblivious Eruna is, and her purposefully misconstruing things other people say, or just outright steamrolling over them verbally.If you can get past the fact that there has never, ever been a teenage girl this confident and blatant about her sexual attraction to women, it's a fun and breezy watch.